LI SHIGONG

I was on my way to work on the subway Line 13, just after sunset, when I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. She was sitting a few feet down from me in our subway car, somehow distinct from the other homeward-bound, fluorescent-lit passengers. Over the next few minutes, longer glances soon colored in the details of that first hasty sketch. She was older, perhaps 60 or 70, in a colorful, old blouse and long black skirt, hair pulled up but veering toward eventual disarray. She was small, just a shade from being frail, constantly making slight, energetic movements, and somehow, truly alone in that way peculiar to the eccentric.

After another minute or so, I felt a finger poking at my arm. I must admit that after three years of living in China I've been calloused by hundreds of unsolicited requests to practice English, go to a lady bar, buy DVDs, examine some artwork, change money, or whatever need. I as a foreigner seemed best suited to meet. Plus, I can be a grouch. So I was on my guard, grudgingly taking off my earphones as I turned to the intrusion. It was the woman. She had slid down the bench to sit next to me, smiling broadly.

For a brief moment, my heart broke. She was one of those old women in whom you can see all the small joys of girlhood still preserved in their eyes. I leaned forward, smiled, and asked softly, "Ni shuo shenme? (What did you say?)"

My Chinese is functional, providing bursts of clarity at times and dimness at others. She was insistently saying something about my being a student. "Yes," I said, "I study at the University of International Business and Economics." She asked where I was from. "America," I replied, relieved to still be on familiar conversational ground, though I had no idea where this was going. She said something that gave me the impression that she thought she knew me, and was confirming information she already had. Then, for a minute or two, there was something about trips to the new airport in some other city. It crossed my mind that we must make quite a pair—a tall, 31-year old white man and a diminutive, elderly Chinese woman, huddled close in intense conversation as northern Beijing flashed by our windows.

Throughout this time she was fingering a necklace of large beads heaped in a velvet drawstring bag. She had bony, angular features and a hawkish nose not very common in China. Her skin was weathered and drawn, and she continued to look at me with an almost enraptured intensity as she talked. The fluidness of her speech suggested she was oblivious to the possibility that I might not speak Chinese. In fact, she didn't seem particularly curious about me at all and seemed quite certain she knew me. It dawned on me that she could be mentally ill.

I managed to grasp a few more words—it was her daughter's birthday. I asked how old, and, obviously proud at my interest, she told me 42. I wondered if this daughter had visited her in years. I've been a medical worker in Baltimore and seen a lot of elderly abandoned by the young. And then the train arrived at Shangdi Station. I hate to admit, a part of me was relieved. My Chinese was faltering and there was some sadness weighing on me. I told her this was my stop and she just nodded and waved me off, smiling, as if she expected to see me again tomorrow.

I often ask myself how similar Westerners and Chinese are, how much we really have in common. I come up with different answers on different days. I've noticed, however, that the mentally ill often seem to pass more readily through the boundaries of culture. The schizophrenic man shouting on a street corner, the old woman rambling like an old friend on your commute—they seem similar whether they are in Beijing or Moscow or New York in a way that the mentally "well" do not. And we seem to pity and often shun them the same way.

At the same time, when I've talked to such people in China I've noticed something else: They usually don't see me as a foreigner. Whether it was a woman talking about her daughter's birthday or a man on a Guangzhou bus pointing out a problem on his identity card—they just talked, one human to another, about whatever was on their minds. Despite probably being the first foreigner they'd encountered up close, they seemed to just fixate on some vital point that marked me as human—eye contact perhaps—and reached out to that. This woman just saw a "person"—which, really, is the only relevant point when you've got news to share.

I won't draw any grand conclusion from our brief chat. I'm sure many of the mentally ill anywhere are just as likely to view foreigners as some kind of space alien. I suppose I just find something compelling in the childlike, though bittersweet, happiness of an old woman on her daughter's birthday and her unabashed desire to share that with a stranger, even one from across the ocean, on the Xizhimen-bound Line 13.

The writer is an American living in Beijing